The Reconstruction of Vision and the Scarlet Witch
by kousagiwrites
Summary: Having survived the ordeal of the Raft prison by meditation, Wanda's power has evolved exponentially, leading her to question her control over it. Faced with a future that has begun to fray, Wanda must make choices as nightmares and scarlet light threaten to tear the world by it's very seams. [Scarlet Vision, Crosspost from Ao3, illustrations linked. Updates every other Thursday!]
1. A Premonition of a Tangent End

**Author's Note—there is an illustrated version of this story located on Archive of our Own!  
Find it here, delete spaces between dot, org, and the slash: archiveofourown -dot-org/ works/7251481  
This story also has a tumblr to follow updates, news, art, and more: reconstruction .kousagi .net**

In June, I began uploading this story on Ao3 (since it's intended to have illustrations every chapter, and Ao3 allows for images within posted stories.) I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me to go ahead and share the story here, even lacking the images. But for every chapter, I'll also be providing a link to it's Ao3 location for those who want to read each installment with the illustrations. The story updates every other Thursday (one Thursday, skip a week, then Thursday, skip a week, etc.)

Please look forward to it!

* * *

The roar and rattle of the lift's motor and cables echoed against concrete walls. It was loud enough to muffle the quiet, choked sobs of the woman inside, one Wanda Maximoff. She had collapsed against a wall just below a palm-sized smear of blood, stealing this one moment of solitude to mourn. The bruised mess of her face was strained into anguish, and as her head cleared, she spat blood.

She couldn't say what was on the other side of this building's walls or even if the floor she was descending from would even exist in several more minutes. Perhaps the upper levels would simply cease to be, perhaps they would melt into that black, inky flood of tar and come crashing down through the stairwells.

Either way, all she could do was pray that Clint had made it out of there.

Shifting slightly caused pain to shoot up through her leg and side from the stab wound that was quickly soaking through its bandages. Wanda cursed under her breath, every nerve in her leg like fire. If those demons didn't catch up to her first, she was going to bleed out. One or the other. There was not much running left on this leg.

Steadying her breaths, Wanda sought to calm herself. That's what Vision would have encouraged her to do. Nestled in her arms, she cradled all that remained of him—a lifeless head, cut clean down the vibranium seams that met his neck and clavicle.

" _Keep him safe."_ Clint had told her before they parted ways.

 _Keep him safe_ , she repeated in her mind. As if there were some hope for him. She wanted to believe it—but she could not sense the myriad of thoughts that had always flowed through his mind before. Nor could she sense the soft, warm glow that always shone inside of him like some distant sun—when death claimed a body, the soul was released and dispersed.

Perhaps Clint truly believed, more than she did, that they would find a way to get Vision back.

The lift's bell sounded as it came to an unplanned stop on the second level.

Wanda bolted up, weak crimson sparks flickering to fragile life on her one free hand. With a rusty groan, the doors screeched open. Wanda was ready to strike, clutching Vision's head close.

In the corridor's gold light, she caught a certain scarlet glint atop the figure's head and instantly, Wanda's fears melted away.

"Nat!" Wanda cried, rushing to the lift's gates. She helped push the heavy machinery open and Natasha was quick to pull her out, one protective arm around her.

"Come on, we gotta move quick." Natasha said, face exhausted and pale.

She didn't look good, either, Wanda realized with a pang of guilt and anger. Natasha was leaving a trail of blood from the gunshot wound in below her ribs. One shaking hand was pressed against the wound. Her body was all of bruised and broken, but still, Natasha carried on, giving her injuries little notice.

Natasha looked back into the empty lift and then back to Wanda, eyes widening for a moment, "Where's Clint?"

Wanda said nothing.

As quickly as Natasha's expression came, it faded, "…we don't have a lot of time left. This place is falling apart. Stay close to me. Can you run?"

Wanda nodded.

"Good. You're going to run."

Natasha was leading her down the mess of a corridor and through the ground level of the warehouse. They turned and made way down a small, half-flight of stairs. The lights had flickered out, leaving them in the dark until the flashlight on Natasha's handgun lit the way.

"The only clear exit is through the loading bay. There's a door on the north wall. Damn thing actually leads outside. Get through it, get out, get to the lake."

Leaning against one another, Wanda and Natasha staggered through the halls. They passed a string of doors, some caved in and smashed by inhuman fists and some burned out and reeking of ash and cinder.

"You're coming too, right?" Wanda asked.

The complexion in Natasha's stoic face seemed to drain a little more with every step. Beads of sweat mingled with smattered blood, dirt, and bruise. Wanda could hear the subtle strain in Natasha's breaths, leading her to wonder if there was damage to her lungs from that shot through the torso. Had her powers not been so frail, she'd have easily dipped into Natasha's mind for the answers to her questions—but they too, were fading just as fast as Natasha.

Natasha ignored Wanda's question and said simply, "…you have to get Vision out of here."

Breaking glass interrupted Natasha. Two cryptids tumbled through an office window's remains and hobbled onto the floor. With loud, wheezing breaths, they carried the burning glow of fire over their long, bony limbs. Shining embers dusted off of their arched backs as they lurched in toward them. Glass caught in their long skirts scratched against the floor with every step.

A stream of inky, boiling tar spilled from the ceiling, just a few meters to Natasha's left. The two of them paled as they watched it pour. One slender pillar of tar, and then another, before several rushing falls had torn through and began to flood the corridors. Boiling heat was fast filling their path and Natasha kicked through the door at the end, guiding them to their destination.

"Go!" Natasha commanded as the bay's north exit came into sight.

Several more of the burning demons were climbing out of the tar that pooled in low spots of the floor. Natasha fired at the ones closest to them, gunshots that deafened in the echo of the bay. Wanda pulled whatever heavy equipment she saw, levitating it into the air and throwing it at the demons. Little more than tools and light crates would budge at her mind's touch—the forklifts and power equipment around was wretchedly impossible to move.

The stench of the boiling tar and every rancid creature the tar pools birthed sickened and dizzied Wanda.

"I'm not telling you again!" Natasha's voice came behind her, "…go! Get out of here!"

"I'm not leaving you!" Wanda cried.

When Wanda turned back to Natasha, she saw just how many of the quaking demons were walking toward them both. Natasha, standing before this growing, glistening hoard, turned her gun on Wanda.

"Go, or I'll take that damn stone myself."

Something inside of Wanda felt like it had been gutted. Shaking her head, Wanda pleaded, "Don't leave me. Please… don't make me go without you. I already had to leave Clint, I'm not leaving you, too."

Natasha's features softened under a bruised pallor.

Tears stung at Wanda's eyes and her body trembled. Inside was a storm of frustration and fury—this sense of powerlessness, of having to run, having to hide, it was as infuriating as it was terrifying. It was a familiar bite from the same beast that hunted her in the past.

"You have to go, Wanda. Protect the stone." Natasha said, her clear eyes fixing on the inanimate head in Wanda's arms, and she added, "…protect him."

Natasha's gloved hand smoothed gently over Wanda's tousled hair. Natasha gave a soft smile, before her hand left Wanda's head. The cryptids were mere meters from them both, now.

"Run. Run and don't look back. I'll see you when I do, kid."

Natasha turned back to their pursuers with a fresh clip in her gun.

Wanda made for the door.

Gunshots rang out in the corridor's concrete walls, deafening ears that were already ringing. The third and final sign of the nightmare reaching its pattern climax arrived in the form of familiar gold tendrils rising up from the pools of tar and climbing walls like possessed vines.

Splintering, crackling, and glittering in what little light filtered in from distant flickering lights, the tendrils were weaving toward them both. She heard more frantic gunshots. Wanda's hand was on a dirty doorknob and it turned with resistance. She heard the empty click of a spent clip.

" _Don't look back."_ Natasha had said.

Wanda pushed open the door and the midnight shine of pale snow filtered in. Frozen wind hit her like a sheet of needles. The door almost threatened to slam shut against the gale. Wanda shouldered the heavy door open in a flurry of red lights. She was met with an icy gale and the wet storm of frost outside.

Over her shoulder, Wanda looked back.

In both hands, the agent held her last two weapons. Wanda could hear Natasha's electric batons light up. That was the last Wanda saw of Natasha before she made her way into the storm.

" _Follow the path,"_ Harkness had said, _"…and he shall meet you on the lake."_

Down several steps and out onto the bank of Lake Wundagore. The surface was frozen solid and Wanda realized she was not alone on this path toward the heart of the lake. A spotted trail of blood almost shone like a scarlet path, illuminated bold against snow and ice.

Onto the path, then.

Wanda pressed forward, cautious, exhausted, trembling. The pain in her leg was agony and the blood loss left her feeling she could be blown away in the wind at any second. The last miserable hours had been the first time in years that she truly could not hear or feel any presence around her. No powers, no red lights, nothing but the overpowering awareness of silence. The suffocating, constant realization that her powers were fading.

She felt the outpour of tears burn down her cheeks. Clutching Vision's head tighter, she cursed under her breath in Sokovian once more. Her foot caught in the crags of shifting ice, tearing her balance away and sending her toppling over onto her knees and side.

Freezing ice bit at her fingertips, her palms, and her cheeks. A hammering pain in her head cried out where it had met the lake's solid surface as though she'd plummeted into concrete. When the half-second of vertigo passed, she realized Vision's head was no longer in her arms. Her resolve broke, tears fell, and she reached out for him, an arm's reach away.

Taking his head back into her arms, she cried.

"Vision…" Wanda's voice quaked. No amount of focus in her powers, on the head in her arms, or even the stone embedded in Vision's forehead lent her any sense that life remained.

She was alone.

Just like in Novi Grad.

Through the dusting of snow on the wind, she saw the dark form of trees and a rhombic rooftop of a derelict structure. Wanda recognized it as the island near the heart of the lake and that small church Harkness had pointed out to her on a clear night.

 _Keep running,_ Wanda told herself, willing her body back to its feet and closing the distance between herself and the island.

She could almost see the silhouette of the church's bell tower rising up through the shadows. Wanda could taste blood on her lips, her face too frost-numbed to feel it trickle down her forehead and across her nose.

Wanda certainly heard that low hum, however. Growing louder with each step.

The pain in her leg intensified tenfold when a gold vine tore through the ice beside one foot and then tore through her thigh like a spear—a sense of déjà vu washed over her, but only for a one blissful second before the pain fell on her like a firestorm.

A scream rang out, before Wanda dropped down and felt another vine rip through her shoulder. Several more tendrils cracked through the ice and spiraled around her limbs, tearing her downward. She clutched the head in her arms for dear life and continued a pathetic, hopeless struggle for that island, that church. With a furious and terrified cry, Wanda reached deep into her mind for scarlet lights to tear the wretched binds away.

Reflexively, one hand moved. Nothing.

Her wrist was caught in another splintering vine and it was torn down against the ice.

This was the end, then. A realization that dawned on her just as it did in Sokovia, the moment she felt everything plummet.

This time, there was no Vision to catch her.

The ice groaned and cracked around her as more vines tore into the air around her, each thorn glittering gold. A pull followed under cracked ice. Wanda felt frozen, black water slosh up from beneath each frozen fracture. She panicked and kicked against the vines one last time before water and ice caved in around her body.

Frozen, deprived of air, the vines dragged her down until the surface was just a fading light far above.

Wanda was falling, drowning, freezing, until every sensation unified as null, black nothingness.


	2. To The Envy Of Thoughtless Slumber

Sometimes she could imagine it—the swirling and crashing of waves against the impenetrable structure of the prison, the "Raft" as they called it. Vast, infinite even, they were submerged somewhere miles from land beneath the cold, black heart of the Atlantic. Wanda spent a lot of time in silence, dreaming about the walls of water around them that often made the walls groan and the entire structure rock lazily under deep ocean storms.

In this time, there was not much else to do besides try and lose herself to dreams. Otherwise, she found herself involuntarily listening in on the sadistic thoughts of the guards pacing before her cell or she would catch herself stewing over the events that had put her there—that airport in Schkeuditz.

The rocking of the Raft initially sickened her, but in time, the vertigo and the claustrophobia (mostly) passed, leaving only a nightmare's echo of some soothing sway. With her arms bound under that heavy blue jacket, the most Wanda could do was lose herself in thoughts—her own, or that of those around her. Whichever were loudest.

Clint and Scott both had very similar trains of thought—they thought of their families, their children. Clint went without sleep longer than Scott or Sam. He laid on his cot staring at the ceiling, his mind a cocktail of bitterness, regret, betrayal, and _worry_ for his wife and children. The name, "Laura" crossed his mind incessantly, to the point that Wanda thought that it would be forever burned into the bottom of her own mind. Quiet at first— _Laura_ —louder by three days in— _Laura, I'm coming home, I promise_ —screaming by the sixth day, though Clint's face was without expression— _Laura! I'm alive, I'll be back, I swear to God, I'll never leave your side again!_

Scott mulled over notably less-pained thoughts. He took solace in the knowledge that "Cassie" was safe with "Maggie"—these were strangers to Wanda, but by the fourth day, she had watched, _felt_ enough of Scott's memories to know each subtlety of their faces, their expressions, the way Cassie scrunched her freckled nose when she looked at bugs with many legs and looked up at her father with a toothy grin, or even the way Maggie glanced sideward and held her husband's hand a little tighter when Scott was near (an ex-wife?)

Scott worried about them—the want to be near them again was every bit as loud as Clint's want to be in Laura's arms and to feel Lila and Cooper throw their arms around his waist. But where Clint worried about his wife being alone in a homestead, Scott took solace in the home Maggie provided Cassie. Wanda also glimpsed an ant the size of a small dog following Cassie around… but she was not sure if she had simply fallen asleep and dreamt that part up. That couldn't have been real…?

Sam's mind was on one person only—with the occasional annoyance that, "on Tuesday, I'd had a date," passing through his mind every now and then. Wanda's sense that it was attached to Agent Hill. The person at the forefront of Sam's mind, however, was Steve.

 _Steve. Steve, man. I know you're coming back for us._

Wanda clung to Sam's hopes. Sam and his fond memories of Steve—Sam and his dreams that the doors would be blown open and Steve would be there when the dust settled. Sometimes he imagined it with Steve alone, sometimes, with that Bucky Barnes at Steve's side. Either way, Sam never lost hope that Steve would come for them. Wanda fixated on that—for as long as she could—until that hope was chipped away by each passing minute in the Raft.

Never quite fond of her own dreams, Wanda fought sleep where she could. These days, Wanda could not wake screaming into the night to find Pietro's soothing arms coming around her, telling her it was only a bad dream. Nor could she wake in a cold sweat just to find herself in the safety of the Avengers facility, in the bed that she had only just started to feel was distinctly her own.

When sleep caught up to her, she dreamt of all the same horrors that had plagued her since childhood. The red flickering light of the missile that had torn into her family's kitchen. The days she and Pietro waited, nearly crushed under debris and rubble, watching that red light blinking in and out, waiting for the last flicker of light before the flash that would end them both.

Wanda was never very fond of sleep.

Interrogations and psych evaluations were proving fruitless to her captors as Wanda spoke little and made even fewer requests. Even when the rise and fall of the Raft made her mouth dry and her stomach turn, she did not bother to ask for water. They wouldn't bring it. They ignored Lang (and he never hesitated to ask for anything) and they would ignore her.

They only acknowledged him when he sang his shrill notes and incited the slam of their batons against his cell.

"Shut the hell up in there!"

"Hey, come on, man!" Lang's dejected voice came.

Wanda could hear the guards' thoughts, all mulling over ways to torture them should the much-awaited orders arrived. A certain Amos who monitored their cell block for nine hours a day often daydreamed about electrocution and waterboarding. Lang was the first on his list, but Amos was a man of few words and would only make Lang aware of this through action. Wanda decided that Lang, Sam, and Clint were lucky to be deaf to the sadistic thoughts swirling in the guard's head. Amos's head was full of "fond" memories of victims who did not survive his interrogation tactics—Wanda had to forcefully remove herself from his mind, lest the visions of his past seep into her already-wretched nightmares.

She kept silent when they shuffled her into laboratories and took detailed scans of her brain, of the electromagnetic anomalies pulsing through her head. Wires pinching through her skin were enough to bear with mild complacency, overdrawn blood was enough to grit her teeth and bear silently, but their frustration with her at the lack of answers each test yielded could only go on for so long.

"I don't know what Dr. List did to me," Wanda had hissed on the last day of examination, "…he injected me with serums and he subjected me to pain and seizures like none you could ever imagine. My brother and I were lured into his lab with the promise of hope, but instead, we were dissected and chemically manipulated like rats."

Dr. Matsumoto was the tired old man in charge of picking apart her body's altered evolution. His team was coming up with no answers, and he was growing exhausted with the lack of information Wanda could give him. He had listened with a clipboard in hand, taking notes on her words, repeating often, "…and the Infinity Stone? You never once saw it?"

"Never. I saw it only on the day the Avengers infiltrated Dr. List's compound, when Stark…" Wanda trailed off. A mixture of anger and something she could not quite describe filled her. Before she knew it, tears were spilling over the edges of her eyelids. She was right back where she started… and once again, Stark was to blame. For a minute, there… she had trusted the man.

"I'm not as inhuman as Mr. Ross tries to paint me, dear," Dr. Matsumoto sighed, laying his clipboard flat over his lap, "…but do try to remember if you're forgetting any certain details. They want me to begin surgical testing, examination, and biopsy soon. I'd like to get to the bottom of your gift without cutting through your skull."

Wanda wanted to laugh—this was no gift.

Interrogation intensified with each passing day. They wanted to know where Rogers and Barnes were. Those were details that not even a clairvoyant witchling in a straitjacket could tell them. She made this clear to them in the few times she broke her silence in an interrogation room.

"Rogers will make himself known when he arrives. Ask him then." Wanda stated.

Amos didn't hesitate to remind her of one painful detail, "Don't think for a second you would even be safer out there, out after a jailbreak, little witch."

Amos and Ross and two other guards behind her had a way of burning straight through her very soul with their eyes alone. Under stark lighting, every time she blinked, she saw each of them in double for a moment's breath. She was dizzy, hungry, exhausted, and nauseated, always.

"You think you've got it so bad in here, princess," Ross said, smirking, "…out there, you know what they say about you? You, who went against the United States government with hands soaked in the blood of Lagos and Sokovia? They say you're lucky they can't run into you in the streets. They say they'd like to tie you up and burn you at the stake like the witch you are. Before you bring your curse onto American soil."

Wanda shut her eyes, she felt vertigo again. She swallowed bile.

"You know what they call you?" Ross continued.

"What do they call me?" Wanda humored Ross, if only to hurry along this unwanted conversation.

"They call you a blood-stained witch. The Scarlet Witch."

Wanda feigned a weak scoff, "I like it."

"You like it?" Ross beamed at her with a nod. He gestured to one of the guards behind her. Wanda tensed.

"Well, then, Scarlet Witch, where are they? Rogers and Barnes. Where were they headed, where were they in such a goddamn hurry to that they would so happily just leave you and everyone else behind?"

"It's as I said before, Mr. Ross. Even if I knew, you couldn't pry the answer from my cold, dead body."

"Don't think accidents can't be arranged." Ross answered with a snap of his fingers.

She felt thick, gloved fingers grip her hair and Wanda screamed. It was cut short when the nose and forehead were thrust into the surface of the table. Tasting blood, Wanda collapsed onto her side, stumbling out of the chair.

With her body still wound up in the jacket, Wanda could only curl into a pathetic, sore heap. She heard boots shuffling on the floor around her, heard the clicks of their guns taking aim. Wanda screamed again, this time in fury at how helpless her tightly bound arms left her. No scarlet lights, no throwing chairs across the room into some damnable fool's face, nothing.

There had to be something she could do, even without her hands.

Something.

Two of the guards lurched forward and dropped to their knees in sudden groans and cries. They clutched their skulls and quaked under the fury rising inside of Wanda's mind. For a short, miserable moments, they would feel the ache and blood swelling in her nose and the rattling pain in her bruised forehead.

"Don't get _too_ upset, darling," Ross said, eying the decommissioned soldiers, "Like I said, it was an accident."

Ross was too far away. He was just a few steps too far away without the curl of her fingertips to guide the scarlet lights she'd not seen in days. Without her hands, her powers were still there, but confined and weak.

One of the two soldiers tore off his helmet and blood streamed from his untouched nose. It dripped over his lips just like Wanda's blood trickled past her own. The other soldier gripped Wanda's hair again, "…knock it off, witch!"

"At ease, boys," Ross said, stopping the man shy of throwing Wanda back into the nearest hard surface. Wanda winced and her concentration broke just enough to release the bleeding man from her focus.

"Take her back to her cell. I want to get the collar out and give it a test run."

Wanda was dragged to her feet, her hair finally released.

"Get medical on that pretty face of hers, this isn't Guantanamo." Ross said.

Lead back to her cell, the bindings were tightened and when she saw a steel case being rolled toward her with medical's white and blue coats, she felt dread—dread, crashing over like an avalanche. If only because, suddenly, she could feel a very loud, shared feeling amongst the guards buckling her into straps against the wall. _Safety_. _Their_ safety, specifically.

A sense that each of their common fears of her were suddenly melting away at the knowledge that the collar was coming.

Whatever it was, it was meant to protect them and hurt her.

"Don't think too much. It's going to hurt." One of the medical staff said, fastening the collar around her neck.

Wanda's fear and subsequent struggle were admittedly a waste of energy and strain. But the thrashing and screaming that followed were reflexive, instinctual. The heavy, cold machine they clasped around her neck had a low hum to it that carved a deep, black cavity through her mind.

Ross stepped delicately around the scene, watching from the safety of several meters away, between two armed guards.

"Go ahead and set it to ten. No need to take any chances."

"Brainwave sensitivity set to ten." An aide said, adjusting switches on the monstrous device.

The low hum became a deafening electric pulse that only Wanda could hear. She screamed and she kicked and they held her down. Her mind was a roaring red storm locked inside the confines of her skull. The storm was desperate to reach out and tear into their bodies with scarlet tendrils. Now, however, the more she thought of it—or anything—the more that pulse tore through the red lights like an obsidian machete cutting through a forest. Each branch bled.

The pain went away when her mind cleared for a single breath, and then lashing out again, with more rage than before, that pulse came back with a flood of agony that finally, blessedly, drowned her out of consciousness.

It would be several days before she learned how to control the involuntary subtleties of her mind that she had never noticed until the collar enlightened her to them.

Several days and twelve instances of being agitated and deafened and electrocuted to the point of losing consciousness, only to wake up again by the collar's burning charge.

Focus. _Focus._

Dreams came and went.

Memories intermingled with her imagination in the same way drops of blood spiral into little red clouds when spilled upon water's calm surface.

Memories of Pietro, the way he stood sentinel between her and angry— _frightened_ —waifs in their orphanage.

 _"Spaliti veštice,"_ she recalled the voice of the first child who said it.

Wanda had clung to her brother, hiding in his shadow as he yelled back at them—they were ignorant, they were fools, they were wrong about the curse and ill-luck filling the orphanage. They were wrong, Pietro argued, wrong about Wanda—Wanda was not the cause of everyone's bad luck.

 _"Spaliti veštice!"_ Another child had chimed in, and then another, and two more. Chanting. Throwing dolls, books, crayons. Pietro shielded her. The corner of a heavy book had struck her in the eye.

In and out of consciousness, she recalled the last moment she heard Clint's voice, yelling, along with Sam and Lang's. Wanda wasn't sure why they were yelling—she only recalled waking up form a nightmare in a great torrent of pain.

"Get that thing off of her goddammit!" Sam's voice.

There was a guard on the ground before her cell, seizing. Had she done that in her sleep? It didn't matter in that moment—not with the surge and pulse of electricity burning through her body and tearing her muscles apart by their very fibers. She didn't realize she was screaming.

"You're going to fucking kill her!" Lang's voice.

"Wanda!" That was Clint's voice, she was sure of it.

She heard the baton banging against someone's cell. Then the shrill screech, then silence.

The day before she woke up in a different cell block, she glimpsed Ross standing in front of her cell, watching her. She was shocked again when her reflex beckoned her to listen to his thoughts. More screeching in her exhausted, throbbing brain followed, drowning out any of his thoughts she may have picked up on. Wanda heard him exhale long and slow through his nostrils. Ross narrowed his eyes at her.

"Of all the monsters in this cage, I think you may be my favorite."

"Take this off… please," Wanda had begged, voice hoarse from days of screaming, "…god, please, please take this off."

Ross shook his head, "Take comfort in knowing there's a place in hell for whatever made you. We're all safer this way. With you like this."

Wanda may have cried, had she not felt dehydrated and slight. It was of more comfort to just fall back into empty unconsciousness than to even swallow the bland, grey food they brought her.

That was the last she saw of Ross before she was taken to a cell block far from the others. Her space was half the size of the previous cell. It did not matter. She was now bound against the wall by the straps of the straitjacket. Wanda was not even allowed the comfort of laying down to sleep. All she could do was hang, slump over when fatigue finally took her into sleep.

The collar felt like fire when too many thoughts sprang up in her mind.

A slow, electric burn, from the inside out.

Wanda's only solace came from the dreams she managed when she slept. Dreams quiet enough not to trip the collar and wake her to a storm of electrocution.

Dreams melted into nightmares, but even in nightmares, she dreamt with a metaphorical hand clamped over her mouth as not to wake the electric beast around her neck.

In her nightmares she saw fire and the light of rockets over Sokovia, of dirt and concrete and dust.

In her dreams, she felt Pietro's hand clasped tight around her own, heard him whisper to her, _"It will be alright, stay with me, Wanda."_

In her nightmares she saw books being flung through the air at her and her brother. Children shouting in their native tongue. Pietro's arms wrapped protectively around her, standing between she and their peers, as he told her, _"It will be alright, stay behind me, Wanda."_

 _"Spaliti veštice! Spaliti veštice!"_ The children in her memory sang.

The monotony of this persistent nightmare went uninterrupted for an indeterminate amount of time. Wanda lost track of days and stopped thinking in terms of time. Nobody was coming for her. Not Steve. Not Pietro. Not Vision.

When the Raft broke the ocean's surface, it was a stomach-sinking motion that everyone felt and braced themselves for when the alarms blared. Wanda stirred from her self-imposed conscious void with curiosity. She overheard a guard at the end of her cell block mention a certain "guest" had arrived. A certain "Mr. Stark" he said.

Stark.

A thought crossed her mind, perhaps the only thing keeping her from spiraling into a vortex of rage at the knowledge of Stark's presence. A crimson thought with ornate blue eyes—Vision in all his serenity, perhaps was he there with Stark, at Stark's side?

Vision had said nothing at that airport. He looked away when cold cuffs locked around Wanda's wrists and she was shuffled into an armored vehicle separate from Lang, Clint, and Sam. She had thought, just maybe, just by some crazy stroke of… something, that Vision may have fought for her with his words. That was how Vision fought best, she knew, with his words, his logic, his reason.

But Vision stood beside Tony in some apologetic silence. No logic or reason could have defended her, it seemed.

Did the apology from Schkeuditz still stand? Wanda wondered, but concluded that it was in his nature to follow orders. To comply to the will of absolute order. Another prick of the knife that was anger, starting at the apex of her torso, dragged down in a scarlet line to her very core.

Stark was in and out of the facility. It was not a long visit.

Had her powers not been stifled by her effort to remain a mental void, Wanda may have tried to listen in on his thoughts. It was too exhausting to keep enduring the collar's fury, however. When Stark's presence was gone, the Raft's alarms blared again and Wanda drew in a queasy breath. Back below the Atlantic they went.

Back into darkness she went, into restless sleep and that hallucinogenic cocktail of light dreams and heavy nightmares.

She dreamt about the cold forest in the Sokovian mountains. At least, Wanda assumed, that must have been the source of those images. Surely, it was some childhood memory that brought the scent of damp soil and mildewed wood to her mind. Surely, it was a memory of autumn, when the last gold and scarlet leaves were falling and only evergreens in the hills kept their needles.

Wanda began to dream of a woman in red walking along overgrown paths in the mist, tracing her fingertips along the bark of certain trees. Paths that forked every few meters, and knowingly, the woman in red walked until she became further and further away from Wanda.

Finally, she was a dim shadow in the fog.

Then, she was gone.

Only Wanda remained in the words, at a forked path. Her breaths crossed her lips in cloudy white puffs. She heard only her breaths. There was no wind to rustle the leaves and branches in the canopy overhead. Above her, the sky was obscured by a veil of mist.

Wanda eyed these two paths. Where did the woman in red go?

 _"Surely there is no evil imaginable to compare, with the cruelty of that cold sun in the cold air. And that enormous night, like the first chaos of things,"_

Seeing that woman in red, Wanda was oddly reminded of Vision's voice, reciting passages from a certain book of poems, many, many months ago.

A gold glint flashed in the corner of her eye, striking for her attention against the scenery of the woods in greyscale.

She thought it a snake at first, moving under the brush toward a northward trail.

Despite tired eyes fixing on that odd flash of color, her mind was elsewhere, slipping into the realm of memory. In this memory, she had listened to beautiful words woven by a beautiful voice. Curious about him, all those months ago, Wanda had taken a seat in the lounge beside Vision, her dizzy bravery fueled by red wine.

Vision's voice was echoing in her mind, reciting hypnotic poetry, _"I envy the very animals, to whom slumber brings…"_

She remembered watching Vision's eyes, ornate, blue scanning over each letter as he read to her aloud, _"Over and over the gift of being thoughtless and blind,"_

In those gray, infinite woods, Wanda neared the source of the sunny gleam in the soil. There, Wanda found a single black and gold vine, littered with thorns.

A single color, stark against a monochrome world.

 _"So slowly does the thread of these dark years unwind."_

* * *

 **A/N:**  
Enjoying it thus far, hopefully? :)  
Next chapter drops July 14th—check back, and as always, archiveofourown has the version with the artwork!


	3. The Eclipsed Star, in Half-Light

"That's very beautiful. I never cared much for poetry, but… you make it sound alright. Not so boring."

Wanda's smile was still vivid in his mind. It was rare that she smiled, back in their first shared summer on the cerulean planet Earth. Mourning the recent death of her brother, Wanda often self-medicated with wine and silence. She looked at him in those early, sweltering summer days with some kind of disregard, but he decided, perhaps it was the just desserts of an unrequested savior.

In the beginning, he was certain that she hated him.

Even when she smiled at him, that first time, there was an underlying shadow of mistrust. She regarded everyone with the same forced half-smiles. Wanda's brother, Pietro Maximoff, was gone, and with him died the last shred of trust she held for the world around her.

July of two-thousand and fifteen, he recalled, the second day.

The first time he found himself alone in the facility with only Wanda as his company.

Wanda had not spoken to him since Novi Grad, not until that moment. Bored, it looked like, she had sauntered into the lounge and took a seat beside him, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glaze over her eyes that explained why half the bottle was already gone.

She had brought two glasses. Offered him one. Vision shook his head and resumed indulging in his own growing interests, "Thank you, but no thanks. I do not eat or drink."

Her cerise lips had straightened, slightly sullen, as she downed the contents of the second glass and poured the remaining wine into her own.

"Read another?"

Compliance was reflex for Vision—it was agreeable.

Oh, what would entertain?

Letting the pages sift across his thumb until he stopped on a random page, Vision answered, "As I see it or as you would hear it?"

Wanda furrowed her brow and after a pause, said, "…as you see it, I guess?"

She took another drink.

There did not seem to be venom in her eyes on this particular evening. Uncharacteristic, but pleasant. He preferred this Wanda.

"Le soleil s'est couvert d'un crêpe. Comme lui, Ô Lune de ma vie, emmitoufle-toi d'ombre," Vision spoke.

"Wait, are you reading that in… okay, go back, go back. As I would hear it, then," Wanda laughed, "…I liked what I heard."

She liked what she heard.

Vision felt a want to take a breath. Interest. Interest was _interesting_. A _nice_ feeling.

His eyes shifted up past the pages and to Wanda. She wore a black dress under a black hooded jacket. Tall black stockings that hugged the thighs she had curled under an hourglass body across from him on the lounge. One head tilted slightly to the side, carotid exposed. Irrelevant details.

He continued, in English, "Sleep or smoke, as you will, in silence, somber. And plunge your whole being into the abyss of Ennui."

She was still listening, clear eyes bright and waiting for the next verse.

Continuing, Vision recited, "I love you thus. However, if you wish, like a star eclipsed in half-light, to flaunt in the places which madness encumbers, that is fine. Charming dagger, spring from your sheathe."

Her lips were pink and slightly parted, with the subtle stain of red wine upon the swell of soft flesh. Vision realized, then, that he had never before paid much attention to the shape or color of human lips prior to that moment.

"Illuminate your eyes from chandeliers of glass. Illuminate desires of the louts that pass. I thrill before you, morbid or petulant."

Vision heard her breath in a soft, sleepy sigh. Her lids were growing heavy as she leaned comfortably into the cushions of her seat and eyed him in what he could only describe as a gaze. It was penetrating—and he had wondered, then, if she was peering into his mind again, the way she often did to those around her. What would she see there?

"Be what you will, black night, red dawn, there is no fiber in the whole of my trembling body which does not cry, my beloved Beelzebub, I adore you!"

She remained to hear another three poems, before she slipped into a comfortable wine dream. They shared no other words between the moment she arrived and the moment he returned her slumbering body to her bed. No reference was ever made to it in the following days. None was expected—although in hindsight, perhaps some proof of that moment's existence was desired.

A little over three-hundred and sixty days followed, as they would.

Just as Vision's second summer in the north-western hemisphere of one, cerulean planet Earth, would follow.

The aftermath of Schkeuditz was a surreal sort of blur. There was a distinct sheen of ennui enveloping the empty corridors of the Avengers facility, thickest over the doors leading into dwellings, _bedrooms_ , of Avengers which Hill mentioned only once, "…they won't be coming back."

Vision still found a good many human emotions new and confusing, but he realized that he may have felt his first brush with some mild form of denial during those twenty-one days. The sense that, surely, they would be there one day. Logic was escaping him as of late.

Tony had commented on it, as expected. Natasha had returned with them, in silence, but left as quietly as she had arrived. Rhodes would not return for approximately thirty-seven more days.

Former S.H.I.E.L.D. staff that continued to operate in the Avengers facility answered to Miss Hill, who decided clearly that the former members were now criminals and that their possessions were to be put in storage. A subtle intonation in her voice made Vision imagine these personal effects were to wind up in the incinerator—he was fast learning about the subtleties of human language, where a phrase, in the literal sense, meant one result, versus another phrase, in abstract, meant another.

There was a concern that Rogers or Sam would return and find their belongings gone—displeasure—but Hill assured him, "…they won't be coming back."

They won't be coming back.

His first brush with denial was the inability—the _refusal_ —to process this statement fully.

Six days into the social drought, he glimpsed a small figure dipping into Wanda Maximoff's room and felt something inside of him light up. Hope. Phasing through the wall, he expected to hear her exasperated voice, "Viz! You keep doing this, we talked about you doing this!" and throwing a pillow in his direction, "Use the door!"

But no such welcome followed.

It was a short and slender staff member who was labeling the boxed belongings of Miss Maximoff. Vision had not stepped into the room recently—it was so barren now. He felt something inside his core that he did not yet have adequate words to describe. A chasm in the earth was an image that came to mind.

Empty, vast, _cold_.

No warmth in the room which once homed Miss Maximoff strumming away at a now-absent guitar.

"Oh!" The woman gasped, an item slipping from her grasp. The sound of porcelain cracking on a hard floor drew Vision's attention away from the empty place where Wanda's guitar had been seated.

The woman turned to face a doll that had landed head-first after a tragic tumble off of a shelf. When her eyes fixed on Vision, she was taken aback. In an instant, she regathered her wits and apologized.

"Sorry, Sir. I did not see you come in."

"Miss Maximoff's doll."

"I… yes, I'm sorry. I tried to catch it."

Vision phased over to the woman and to the broken doll. He knelt down, turning the doll in its plaid dress in his hands. The painted face fell apart. The woman had made to start picking up the pieces, but Vision was already on this task.

"Let me, it's kind of my job to—"

Vision interrupted, curt, "Leave."

"I-I'm sorry?"

"Leave." Repeating himself, Vision stopped gathering small shards of porcelain and looked up at her.

"Right. Of course. I'll just… step outside."

Vision picked up a shard of porcelain that had once been the doll's pink cheek.

He recalled the day Wanda brought the thing back in its red dress, cradled in her arms. Vivid in his mind was Wanda's smile as one of her long, dainty fingers wrapped through the doll's brown spiral curls.

"My god, that is the creepiest thing I've ever seen," Tony had said, standing at the kitchen bar.

Wanda's lips had curled in a playful smirk as she bent her fingers and let the doll rise into the air on scarlet waves.

Levitating the doll with her mind, Wanda said, "Oh, I can show you _much_ creepier, Mr. Stark."

Stark's jaw had dropped slowly.

Sam, who had been standing beside Wanda as they entered the lounge, suddenly bolted away from the girl, muttering, "Nope! Nope! I'm out! I fold! Don't you float that creepy-ass doll near me, kid, don't you even!"

Vision could not understand why half of the team was so startled by Wanda and the doll she had apparently found in a downtown thrift store.

"She's kind of cute, isn't she?" Wanda tilted her head to the side. She turned her hypnotic gaze on Vision, who stood beside a visibly uncomfortable Tony. Vision did not know how to react to Wanda back then. She rarely addressed him, much less looked at him in the first weeks after the battle of Sokovia.

Vision had waited too long to respond and as quickly as it had come, Wanda's attention and gaze on him were gone, back on Tony. Regret.

"Cute, like Rosemary's baby cute or…?" Tony shuddered, "…alright, okay. Wanda, come on, seriously. No Satanic dolls or rituals in the tree house!"

"I do not detect any form of threat coming from the doll, Sir." Vision had said.

Tony looked at him and back at the doll and the happy little red sorceress guiding it into the air.

"Nat, I'm gonna need you to call a young priest and an old priest." Tony said.

The doll passed dangerously close by Natasha's shoulder and a visible chill rattled the woman.

"…oh my god. Alright, I'm going, too." Natasha finally conceded, rising from her seat and leaving the lounge behind Sam. This was when Wanda started guiding the doll in a slow, straight path toward Tony and Vision, exactly one and a half meters above the floor, unwavering.

Vision heard a sound that, from that point forward, had a way of echoing in his mind—Wanda's soft laughter. A faint giggle. Reflexively, he drew in a breath, although he did not ever recall needing to breathe in the past. He straightened as the doll approached them and Wanda's amusement increased. Tony took a step back, his back bumping against the sink.

Why was everyone so afraid of a harmless doll? Vision never did get an answer to this. Curious, he reached out to it.

Wanda turned it toward him—cue a yelp from Tony and, "Oh, god! Nope!"

Her puppetry was rather entrancing.

"Wow! Okay, I'm out and I'm calling an exorcist, Wanda!"

Tony nearly walked into Rhodes, who was hurrying into the kitchen, "Where is it? I gotta see this demon doll, where—oh, _hell_ , oh _heck_ , no way."

All of nearly stumbling into Tony—"Move. Move. Can you? Can you, yes, thanks, alright, seriously, Rhodey, that thing's making me real nervous. I don't do well with demons."—Rhodes made a quick about-face and left without even entering the kitchen or the lounge. Their voices echoed in the hall, Rhodes laughing, "Wow. No. Hell no."

Vision took the doll into his hands and it did not feel any lighter than it seemed. He turned it around, observing in curiosity but there did not seem to be any particular weapon or device of measurable threat on the thing.

He looked up at Wanda, concerned.

"Why is everyone afraid of it?"

Wanda, still grinning, gave a shrug, "I couldn't tell you. She's not scary at all. She looked lonely at the store. So I brought her home with me."

Vision looked at the doll again and asked, "Does it have feelings? I do not detect any biological function within it that would allow for conscious psychological reaction, no less any form of sentience."

Wanda crossed over to him and held her arms out. Vision looked at her and then at the doll.

"Can you hand her back to me? Be gentle, she's delicate."

"O-of course, yes." Vision stammered and placed the doll carefully in her arms. He realized after a second too long that his own gaze lingered on Wanda and the sort of smile he had never seen on her face prior.

"I think I'll name her Ana." Wanda declared.

"Ana. Oh yes, that… that is a nice name."

Wanda took the doll without much further acknowledgment of the synthetic man and made way for her room with a certain skip to her step that was as rare as a blue moon.

Ten months followed since that day.

Ana was in pieces in Vision's hands.

Wanda was gone.

Rhodes was in a hospital.

Tony was overindulging in alcohol.

Natasha was but a shadow that moved in and out of the facility, as they say, _like a ghost_. Her presence was temporary—she soon went from _ghost_ to _memory_.

Sam and Clint were prisoners in an undisclosed prison beneath the Atlantic Ocean, with Wanda.

Vision carried the broken doll out of Wanda's room, through a silent corridor that once held the voices of the only family he had known—all of which, now gone.

Hill had tried to reassure Vision, "They're criminals, now. They won't be coming back."

Criminals, now.

They won't be coming back.

Vision placed the doll on a table in his own stark, unfurnished room. The fragments of the doll's broken cranium were aligned in a working order beside it.

Vision repeated Hill's words, "They won't be coming back."


End file.
